Abstract
This paper addresses the need for a comprehensive, corpus-based study of the prepositional passive in the recent past. Sets of prepositional passives from 1870 to 1999 were collected from the Corpus of Historical American English and compared with a control group of “regular” passive sentences. After presenting the diachronic frequency of prepositional passives over the time period, the study explores a number of special characteristics that have been suggested as being typical of the prepositional passive: lexicalization of verb + preposition, participle + noun + preposition combinations with light verbs such as
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